Labyrinths of Love, "Artist, Edward Bekkerman, Labyrinths of Love," Phoebe Hoban

“Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders? And even if one of them suddenly pressed me against his heart, I should fade in the strength of his stronger existence. For Beauty’s nothing but beginning of Terror we’re still just able to bear, and why we adore it so is because it serenely disdains to destroy us.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, The First Elegy.

Artist Edward Bekkerman has always focused on otherworldly entities; angels, spirits, mythical labyrinthine lovers, mystical figures glimpsed in dreams. “It’s a world on another side. It’s another dimension and I am simply tapping into it,” he once said.

With the advent of Covid, that invisible dimension—the other side of the mirror that powers so much of Bekkerman’s work, violently shattered, spewing its lethal shards, and the roles were suddenly, and irrevocably, reversed. Instead of a mysterious world that could be “tapped into,” the virus—an invisible and alien entity from another dimension—aggressively took over, invading our wake-a-day lives, and permanently altering our vision of reality.

For many artists, this new phase of existence turned out to be empowering. Devoid of any familiar quotidian and, even more importantly, divorced by “social distancing” from the intimate circle of friends, family and lovers, those painters and poets whose work is fuelled by introspection, were forced to find within themselves a parallel new world of possibility—and to learn both the limits—and the extraordinary extent--of their own inner fortitude.

No wonder the faces in Bekkerman’s enveloping series, The Labyrinth of Love, are so engorged with explosive emotion that it almost fractures their features. While Bekkerman’s latest work is not overtly about the virus, it is, in a sense, viral. It has a life and logic of its own, that rapidly mutates from canvas to canvas, providing a visual learning curve of how humans deal with an apocalypse.

Bekkerman’s layered portraits in this series share one thing in common: their ET-like eyes. It is as if they cannot believe what they are seeing, and while this expresses true terror, it also, ultimately, conveys a sense of wonder and even hope. “It is not despair,” Bekkerman says,” “But delight.”

Think of it as a breakthrough infection: things that are sublimated and not easily accessed suddenly, volcanically, rise to the surface. How do we not only survive, but actually transcend it?

Nothing epitomizes this more than Bekkerman’s 2020 image What Should I Do? With its widespread, surprised eyes, and a face severely overloaded with too much information (and misinformation), this portrait conveys that first moment of realization that the human race is being assaulted by something completely out of its control. Bekkerman’s characteristic heavily impastoed technique serves to emphasize the gravitas of that dire—but perhaps liberating--understanding.

Most of the portraits in this series express similar epiphanies; indeed they represent an evolution of a being, as suddenly alien as it is human--coming to terms with a brand new reality, a seismic shift in the universe. In I am Sure, the subject seems not only to confront, but to accept his or her fate. But half-a-dozen images before this particular painting, several key iterations have occurred, from Is it You to I Always Knew to Are You Sure?, each expressing its own level of comprehension.

Concurrently with the powerful new portraits, each embedded in thick layers of gestation, Bekkerman also created a new group of canvases that are in some ways a spinoff of his 2015 series, Victory, in that they use a circular, spiral motif to begin to explore what the artist calls the “Labyrinth of Love,” a subject with which he has been engaged for much of his career—the arduous seeking—and finding—of that universal panacea.

This culminates in a remarkable triptych, replete with hidden figures and suggestive figments. Embedded in this enormously complex vision are visible remnants of the viral portraits. Stand back, and amidst the onslaught of visual data, almost confounding in its complexity, you can see the residue of the pandemic portraits. It is as if the artist—and his work—have travelled through our current hell—and, miraculously, come out on the other side. One in which wonder and hope, despite despair and confusion, triumph.

Phoebe Hoban is a renowned writer. She is the author of three artist biographies: Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art, a national bestseller, and New York Times Notable Book of the Year (2016); Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty (2010); Lucian Freud: Eyes Wide Open (2014). Phoebe Hoban lives and works in New York.